Under Rated bands

[Kai Stromler]

This is just bizarre. First someone gets bent out of shape about someone (correctly) identifying Children of Bodom as black metal, then someone gets bent out of shape at the ravings of this strangely bent-out-of-shape person.

Let's set the record straight. Black metal has been around a long time, perhaps since Venom put out the album of that name in 1982 and definitely since Bathory's self-titled LP in 1986. There has been a lot of room for development and evolution in a black metal sound. The rightly famed and lauded Norwegian scene is only one take on the idea.

Children of Bodom sound a lot like Dissection, who are unmistakeably black metal. Dissection sounds nothing like any of the bands V Empire mentioned, but they were in the Scandanavian scene from its beginnings. Burzum, on many of their recordings (the good ones before Varg went to jail anyways) sounds nothing like Mayhem or Emperor from that time period, but you'd be hard pressed to find a blackmetaller willing to deny that _Aske_ and _Det som en gang var_ are black metal records. Sigh sounds like nothing on this earth, certainly not very much like anything that was going on in Norway at the turn of the last decade, but Euro still wanted to sign them to Deathlike Silence before he was killed.

Point: there is a lot of room for diversity, even in black metal. Point the second: if you don't like your genres blended, stop listening to music from Finland. If CoB is 'melodic death', what the hell is Sentenced? Babylon Whores? Sinergy? Nightwish? Alteast the rest of Scandanavia has some rules....some of the time.

As one of me mates said after mixing up the homelands of Aeturnus and Dissection: "Dammit, why can't bands from Norway be black metal and bands from Sweden be death metal like they're supposed to be?"

As for the caring about genres, that kind of goes with the territory of listening to black metal. There are still some of us for whom black metal means something, as an idea more than just a sound. Some of us are a little more mature, and put it into practice in music and our lives, but some just use it as an excuse to start fights with 'untrue' people and fantasize about burning down churches.

--K

[Vale]

all the real punk bands are being killed by the candy punk crap out there.
even the clasics like operation ivy, the misfits, the casulities, nofx, the clash are being over-shaded by pop corupt bands. the maddness must be stopped, listen to the berlin project, rancid, avail, puritan swank, espin 12, splattifeild, left foot first. my rant is over.